U.S. Senate OKs Interim Nuclear Waste Site

The Senate voted Tuesday to establish a temporary storage facility for nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, northwest of Las Vegas. But it failed for a second year to muster enough votes to override an expected veto by President Clinton.

The 65-34 vote, two shy of the two-thirds needed to overcome a veto if all 100 senators vote, keeps open the vexing question of what to do with the nation’s scattered piles of radioactive garbage, 33,000 tons in all.

The bill’s supporters argue that a central storage site would provide a safer repository than the more than 100 sites in 41 states where the nuclear sludge and other dangerous byproducts of nuclear energy generation have been stored in cooling pools.

Opponents argue that storing the waste in Nevada will require carrying it on potentially risky rail or highway trips through populated communities, and that establishing an interim site in Nevada will inevitably lead to creating a permanent facility there.

“The country that harnessed the energy of the atom can’t seem to accomplish the basic task of storing and disposing of waste,” Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) said as the Senate concluded three days of sporadic debate Monday.

The temporary site would be above ground. The government has proposed constructing a permanent storage location in an underground bunker in the same area, but that proposal is mired in controversy. The Energy Department has said four more years of study are needed before decisions can be made.

Many of the current storage sites are in relatively populated areas, including locations near businesses, schools and homes in growing neighborhoods. The temporary site, 100 miles from Las Vegas, is near a former weapons testing range.

With sponsors garnering two more votes than the 63 they received when the measure came up in August, Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho) said, “I think the votes are building.”

The measure now goes to the House, where supporters said work could be completed by late summer. The House did not vote on the bill last year.

The dispute stems from legislation passed in 1982 that gave the Energy Department a deadline of 1998 to take responsibility for storing the nuclear waste products generated by private electrical companies. The waste is growing by about 2,000 tons annually.

But with Congress failing over the years to reach an agreement on the location of such a site, the focus has turned to an interim facility, and the nearest date for building a permanent storage system is now 2015. Transferring all of the material could take 50 to 100 years.

Lott, responding to concerns about the safe transportation of spent fuel rods and other waste, said: “Certainly the naysayers recognize that we do not intend to throw used nuclear fuel on a truck bed or in a boxcar.” Rather, he said, the government would meet the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s rigid standards for the transport of nuclear waste.

“There are only two options--safe, centralized storage, or a continued 41-state pileup of high-level radioactive materials,” said Sen. Frank Murkowski (R-Alaska).

Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.), who opposed the measure, argued that more time is needed to determine how the dangerous byproducts of nuclear power could be stored for untold years, protected against the deterioration of containers and seismic disruptions.

“We are undertaking a mission that has never been done before,” he said. “We are starting down a path to completely isolate from the environment the most dangerous material in human history for a period longer than recorded human history.”

California’s two senators, Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, voted against the bill, as they did last year.